How Did I Survive? — A Memoir

I chose my own name. Michelle belonged to the little girl next door, whose parents and brother loved her greatly. I wanted to be loved like her.

How Did I Survive? is the whole of it. A childhood no child should have. A stepfather who was given a partial lobotomy. Science fiction fandom at fourteen, and the men in it. A marriage, fourteen children raised, three computer stores in Colorado, and a shop called The Internet Store in 1993. A husband who laid his motorcycle down rather than hit a man crossing the road, and broke his back doing it, and who later lost his empathy to the radiation that treated his cancer. Seven years of my own cancer. And, on the far side of all of it, a life the girl at fourteen could never have pictured and would have chosen anyway.

It took eleven years, written inside Steven Barnes and Tananarive Due's writing group. I am dyslexic, and on bad days nearly blind, so I said it out loud and an AI wrote it down. Every word is mine, and I ruled every line.

Read the Forward and Chapter One free. Click Preview above.

51 chapters. Three parts, four appendices, and 22 photographs of the people in it.

What you get: the complete book as a PDF, 249 pages, instant download, yours to keep and to read on anything.

Michelle Deborah Weisblat-Dane's short story "Hope" won an award from Psychology Today and first place from the Pikes Peak Writers. She writes on the ethics of artificial intelligence at iamcompubear.com.

A note on the contents: this memoir does not look away. It includes child abuse, sexual abuse, suicide, abortion, addiction and illness. It is told plainly, without sensation, and without asking anyone to be shocked.